BEN KYLE made “his bigness” when he went into Flagg’s crew on his mission for Craig. He was not admitting to himself or anybody else that he was traitor. He blustered and bullyragged; he had been their boss and he had been fired without cause, he insisted. Even the loyal men did not presume to answer back; he had been too recently their master and the aura of authority still persisted. He came with a white-hot grudge and with rumors which he embroidered to suit his needs. Kyle had been far on the edge of affairs, and only the ripples of the Adonia events reached him. But his statement that Latisan had run away with a girl seemed to be certified by the drive master’s continued absence. And there were those stories of Latisan’s former weakness in the city; they had been sleeping; they were not dead.
Kyle was hiring for the Comas company—unabashed, blatantly. He strode from man to man, banging heavy palm on shoulders. “Come with the real folks. What’s old Eck Flagg to-day? You might as well be hired by a bottle-sucking brat in a baby carriage. Where’s Latisan? You tell me his men went downriver to meet him; they’ve kept on going. He has hid away, dancing his doxy on his knee. Where’s your pay coming from when Eck Flagg goes broke?”
Kyle waded in the shallows where men were rolling logs, shouting to be heard above the roar of the waters.
“We hired for a fight,” said the men who hated the Comas. “But it doesn’t look like one is going to be made.”
“We’ve always stood behind Eck Flagg,” said the old stand-bys of the crew. “But we ain’t getting a square chance for honest work.”
It was plain that the spirit was being beaten out of them under the hammer of Kyle’s harangue—whether it was the adventurous spirit which craved fight or the honest spirit which had sent them north to the job.
When the night came down, after they had cleaned their pannikins of food, steaming hot, from the cook’s kettles, while they smoked around the fire which drove away the evening chill, Kyle paced to and fro among the groups, declaiming, detracting, and urging. He knew that he was prevailing, though slowly. Woodsmen in shifting their allegiance are not swayed by sudden impulse. His voice rang among the trees in the silence of the evening.
“Latisan is a sneak—Latisan is a runaway! Eck Flagg is next to a dead man!” Over and over he made those declarations, battering discouragement into their slow comprehension in order to win them to the Comas company. “And Latisan has thrown down real men for the sake of a girl! Do you want to get the Big Laugh when you show yourselves downriver?”
Voyagers who came from the southward, leaving their canoes below the falls, moved silently, after the fashion of the Tarratines. They halted on a shadowed slope within the range of Kyle’s raucous voice, and Lida stepped forward to listen. The red flames lighted a circle among the trees, and she beheld the seated groups and saw the swaggering malcontent who paced to and fro.
“I’m with the Three C’s now, first, last, and all the time! Their money is waiting for you, men. Come, with the real folks, I tell you!”